matt:littlemore

‘If, as expected, the volume of digital content will increase 10x to 100x over the next 3 to 5 years then we are on the verge of a “big bang” in the communications industry that will provide the UK with enormous economic and industrial opportunities.’
The ‘Digital Britain’ white paper will among other things give Ofcom more responsibility to detect copyright infringement in the digital age. Perhaps about time some new rules are made, still a delicate balance between the protection of intellectual property and space allowed for individuals to express and grow creatively needs to be struck.
Chapters 4 (Creative Industries in the Digital World) 6 (Research, Education and Skills) and 7 (Digital Security and Safety) will be particularly interesting, but it is well worth checking out your rights and restrictions regarding the creation of any digital content.

Info on the Digital Economy Bill

Search for www.culture.gov.uk/images/…/digitalbritain-finalreport-jun09.pdf to view the White Paper

Over the last 10 centuries, ever since the nuem found in Gregorian chants, composers have constantly refined the way they notate music. One thinks of the unequivocal scores of the late 19th century, where an equation was reached between music as it had been created and music as it was performed.
All the while, popular music remained mostly unnotated, but it most certainly influenced what we used to call serious music. In the 20th century, these two trends crystallised in a strange form. First there was a yearning for evermore precision in notation from a large number of composers who wanted to leave no room to the interpreter’s initiative (the composer retaining control like a demiurge). This issue of exact interpretation came to an end with the invention of musique conrete and electronic music (where the composer is necessarily his own interpreter). In parallel, other composers – and in some cases the same ones – have imagined open works (Pousseur, Stockhausen, Cage…) in which the interpreter has control over the order of certain sequences. The complexity of the sound materials – integrating chance, electronics, or specific devices – gave birth to new forms of scores, themselves occasionally opened to interpretation. When music became tape music, it excluded interpretation altogether – it was played back following specific instructions. There may be something mortal (as in finished) in this observation: that is all it is. When the need to re-interpret became impossible to satisfy, we began to look for a way to change the unchangable. The remix was created to perform variations of the music text. When the object of modification is the sound material itself, the process results in new work, with all possible degrees of variation – the scale goes from 1 to 100 – from a light modification to a full-scale re-creation, by way of a middle point where the source is left recognisable and is combined to the mark of the remixer. That’s the most common form.
If one can constantly create new works from older works, then one can assert that there is no base work and that all branches are to be put on the same level.
So we can see that the idea od accuracy in interpretation, one of the biggest issues in previous centuries, was abandoned to a large extent once technology allowed us to work directly on the sound text.
Guy Marc Hinant

Guy-Marc Hinant is an author, editor, and Belgian filmmaker born in Charleroi. He directs the independent label Sub Rosa specializing in electronic music and avant-garde which he is the creator. He is edited An Anthology of Noise and Electronic Music series. He has written several narrative fragments and notes on the aesthetic to the issues of the time, various international journals such as Leonardo Music Journal (SF), Luna-Park (Paris) and for the Magazine Lapin (the Association, Paris). Dominique Goblet comic author companion, he appears in his albums under the name “GM”.

At the beginning of the 1980s, he was a member of the Pseudo Code with Alain Neffe of Bene Gesserit and Xavier Stenmans group. In 2000, he founded OME with Dominique Lohlé, together they make a series of documentaries on the art of listening and noise.

We made mix tapes, they remix music – We watched TV, they make TV
Lawrence Lessig is perhaps the most important voice for artists, authors and coders of the digital age who wish to remix existing media assets without fear of recrimination. He is a founding board member of Creative Commons and a strong supporter of legislation to free up the restrictions on copyright and trademark in the context of technology applications.
Most Vidders and Remixers, if considering copyrights at all, tend to see no problem with using ‘found’ media assets to reconstruct and ‘mash up’ and as their work is generally created for fun and not for profit, simply see their role as one of adding content (and value) to sites such as YouTube. The role of Youtube has become a kind of interactive public access TV – viewers watch, critique, imitate and parody at an incredible rate, media which can itself become (although somewhat short-lived) a popular cultural style in it’s own right.

Lessig says ‘We live in an age of prohibition, where in many areas of life ordinary people live against the law. The kids live life knowing they live it against the law – which is extremely corrosive and corrupting.’

Copyright law has a very unclear role in the digital age – every visual reference is itself a ‘copy’, where many of these copies are used to the benefit of the originator. Is it fair to allow copies which work for the good of the copyright holder and criminalise the copies which don’t? And is it possible that by creating a culture of illegal creativity in the world of new media this may have a detrimental effect on society as a whole?

Anybody involved or interested in Remix Culture should check out his speech on how the law is strangling creativity

For the first time in history, the most powerful mass medium of a society is totally controlled and dominated by advertisers and the market, totally driven by commercial imperatives, saturated by ubiquitous commercials that deliver audiences to advertisers (not programs to audiences).
Avante garde artists’ experimentations with both form and content function as a direct challenge to the ideological and political power of mainstream commercial cinema …no solutions or programmatic statements, but a series of intricate challenges, hints and coded messages, subverting both form and content… it is by definition an aesthetic and political movement… film is sacked, atomised, caressed and possessed in a frenzy of passionate love.
Amos Vogel (From Film As A Subversive Art 1974)

Vogel’s view of the future of mainstream cinema seems to ring true today in relation to the remix culture of social networking sites such as YouTube. Perhaps not entirely subversive in intent, millions of Vidders and remixers are deconstructing and envisioning their own personal takes on film, TV and other media forms in popular culture. Usually as homage to their favourite movies, bands or even TV commercials (caressed and possessed in a frenzy of love) or in other cases a parody or political message (subverting form and content) usually delivered tongue in cheek The ‘Born Digital’ generation are making their own TV from slices of other people’s work, remixing peer’s as well as commercially owned work. Are they Vogel’s (unknowing?) iconoclasts transgressing narrative modes, structures and visual convention? For this is the art of the common people, this is modern entertainment, an ever-changing production and consumption cycle where new styles are immediately critiqued by peers, imitated and devalued. This is art separated from the art world, often illegal in media usage and so widespread almost impossible to police.